By Johnny Bananas

The rage over finding an appropriate mascot for high schools is reaching a fever pitch.  Wait a minute – Fever Pitch – what an excellent name for a mascot!  We could have a thermometer as our emblem, and, never-mind. It will likely upset the COVID positive and virologists and they’ve been through enough already. I digress.

Mascot is a term that references a “talisman, charm, thing supposed to bring good luck to its possessor”.  Also a “person whose presence is supposed to be a cause of good fortune”.  Popularized from a provincial French comedic opera “La Mascotte” (c.1881) where the mascotte was a “sorcerer’s charm, ‘faerie friend’, good luck piece.” For the true historian one can look as far back as a Narbonesse manuscript from 1233 wherein the mascotto was a “procuress, enchantment, bewitchment in gambling” borrowing as it were from masco or “witch” likely derived from the Latin masca meaning “mask, specter, nightmare”.

Perhaps all that is needed is a bit of a history lesson to remind us the actual function of mascot, or the raison d’ etre as they say in Spain, but we’re dealing with public high schools here so of course they haven’t studied history.  I should know, I went to seis of them.  That’s “six” to you non-American speakers.

For nearly one hundred years since the beginning of professional sports in the United States mascots were a source of pride.  They represented both something to be feared like said nightmare, while also offering a source of luck to those who looked to them for as much.  Rather than send teams on to the field with lame names like the color of one’s sox, the sophisticated, having studied up on their 19^th century comedic French plays and 13^th century obscurantist gnostic phraseology, summoned the courage to buck the norm and proffered such names as “giants” and “bears”, clearly more besmirched with the idea of creating fear because who ever felt lucky around a bear?

Yet here we are.  Our schools, rather than excelling at sports and academia, have chosen to excel at grievances.  This is the natural flowing out of beefs with sports teams stemming from a deep seeded hatred of jocks by the professors chiefly responsible for these grudges.  No doubt, they wouldn’t deny the Freudian reality that both their childhood trauma bonds and schizophrenic depression caused by athlete led childhood bullying created in them a systemic need to undo sports itself.  No self-respecting atheist professor would summon the will to forgive the immature actions of children, no.  Not when they could exact revenge on a national level to show everyone who’s boss.  Though physically barely adequate enough to sharpen a number two pencil, these slow-burning brainiacs set out on the long march through the institutions to change the face of sport forever by ruining it, err, “fundamentally transforming it”.

“You can’t possibly know what it’s like to get an atomic wedgy for not being able to kick a little red rubber ball”, gripes one Yale professor of sociology.

“I cried myself to sleep for weeks” bemoans his colleague from Harvard, who now captains his own racially diverse debate team, under the fighting name “Master Debaters”. 

Members of the black lesbian Combahee River Collective, bitter from the reality they were thrice unlucky having been born black, female and descended from the isle of Lesbos, used their self-righteous indignation to bring us the mascot killing philosophy of intersectionality. 

Rather than see the fierce Redskin on the side of a helmet as a source of honor, luck and supposed athletic ferociousness which its proponents intended, suddenly this two-dimensional and fictitious cartoon native who lost his fake life on the imaginary battlefield of history represented hundreds of years of oppression.  In matters such as social hegemony and the battle to gain power, controlling the narrative is the sporting equivalent of controlling the ball. 

It’s 2022 and the revenge of the nerds is on longer a cult-classic movie from the late 1980s.  It’s a real cult systematically infecting the halls of academia with a woke mind virus hell-bent on telling the jocks what is and is not acceptable for games they don’t even care to play.  They are crusaders who rail against religion.  With an anti-racist fervor they build new socially acceptable forms of segregation.  Their anti-colonial passion makes them re-take all that was never theirs. Not at all bothered by the feminist irony created from the Frankenstein-like trans-creature now dominating women’s sports, they move the ball down the field driven to score the touchdown that is equity. 

Rather than try and stop this social juggernaut (juggernaut would make an EXCELLENT mascot name), we must embrace it.  We must suppress our innate racist, mysogynist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and heterophiliac nature to give the wokesters a sporting chance.  It’s obvious they are struggling to rectify this root of bitterness that harbors all of their soul-destroying bah-humbuggery.  So we, the privileged, must do the right thing and lend our filthy hands to support their just cause.

 With that, I give you the TOP TEN Mascot Name Replacements for 2022.

10. The East Saint Louis High De-funders

9. The West Bay Area H.S. Rainbow Brigade

8. The Margaret Sanger Academy Abortionists

7. The Hialeah High Anti-rascists

6. The North Green Bay H.S. LGBTQ-anons

5. The King City Commissars

4. The Archmere Academy You Know the Things

3. The Johns Hopkins Union Vaccinators

2. The Sacred Heart H.S. Atheists

1. The El Paso Tech Undocumented Citizens

Johnny Bananas is the nom de plume of a fake news reporter living in Vermont. Nothing he reports ever actually happened. This is satire, folks.